Building links to your site is a critical part of online promotion. A good article on some techniques *beyond* blogger outreach: "Here are just some of the wealth of link opportunities that are out there in almost every market: Resource pages Forums Directories Professional organizations Events Submission-based Press"…

The mind boggles ... "perhaps the creepiest outgrowth of cryptocurrency 2.0: distributed autonomous organizations, or DAOs. Based on charters taking the form of code on a peer-to-peer network, these are entities that could automate many of the tasks of a conventional organization with varying levels of human input. For instance, a DAO could act d…

"Triplify tackles the chicken-and-egg problem of the Semantic Web by providing a building block for the “semantification” of Web applications. Triplify provides small, light-weight plugins for database-backed Web applications and exposes semantics as RDF, Linked Data and JSON"

As good a definition as you'll find anywhere: "Content curation is sorting through a large amount of web content to find the best, most meaningful bits and presenting these in an organized, valuable way." - The Busy Person's Guide to Content Curation: A 3-Step Process There's more than just a definition - a few good ideas. However, the definiti…

A long, excellent read, with practical tips and tools. More people should read this! "A badly managed meeting can suck away time, energy and money without being productive for anyone. But it is avoidable: Here's what you should and shouldn't do when meeting in a group at work, whether you are leading the meeting or not." - How to Have a Meeting …

A timely post, for me: "... losing one hour of sleep per night for a week will cause a level of cognitive degradation equivalent to a .10 blood alcohol level. You can get fired for coming to work drunk, but it is deemed acceptable to pull an all-nighter." - 7 Things You Need To Stop Doing To Be More Productive, Backed By Science — Business & Mar…

experimenting with this for the bloggingportal reboot

"...is a powerful tool for working with messy data: cleaning it; transforming it from one format into another; extending it with web services; and linking it to databases like Freebase."

"Stephanie shares how marketers can make the most out of the LinkedIn publishing platform." - LinkedIn Publishing Platform: What Marketers Need to Know | Social Media Examiner

"There's no such thing as "perfectly optimized", but I took a stab at drawing up the mythical beast anyway: "... I first saw the "perfectly optimised page" infographic on Twitter, but discovered a much richer, larger article on Moz. In itself, this is a great use of infographics and data visualisation - the infographic stands on its and has bee…

Place all your content eggs in someone else's basket, you'll get what you deserve. Facebook it, after all, a business. Some basic advice here, but it amounts to the same thing: monitor, optimise & diversify: "Facebook organic reach was around 6% in February, 2014 — a decline of 49% from October. For brands with more than 500,000 likes, the fall-o…

Reflecting Shirky's (pre-Twitter) observations about reciprocity, social media and traditional media, Slate reframes how to view Twitter. Worth a read: "Twitter is not a social network. Not primarily, anyway. It’s better described as a social media platform, with the emphasis on “media platform... Social networks connect people with one another…

When planning a social media campaign around user-generated content, first ask yourself how your users see you ... "The initial photo posted by the department was friendly enough: it featured two smiling officers flanking an equally happy member of the public, with a message that asked followers to post pictures with the hashtag for use on the NY…

"Marketers now have a very real option to bring the majority of their media agency work in-house. If agencies want to maintain relevance ... [they need to] break down the silos they’ve spent the last two-plus decades creating.... The silos will come down one way or another. Smart agencies will dismantle them by design; the rest will crumble under…

My second post as an accredited LinkedIn blogger covers how to apply to the Platform, and provides a look at the blogging interface

LinkedIn posts are open to the public, even those not in your LinkedIn network, so you end up with a public blog page, over which you have no control.

The bandwagon effect about the plague of social media experts seems to be coming to a close, at least in corporate USA

"The real question isn't why we don't read anymore, it's why we comment—passionately and with the utmost confidence—after reading only a headline. " - NPR Pulled a Brilliant April Fools' Prank On People Who Don't Read

Some good tools to check out "Some of the exciting new tools for productivity that you can use today include: Quip, Evernote, Box and Box Notes, Dropbox, Slack, Hackpad, Asana, Pixxa Perspective, Haiku Deck, and more below. This list is by no means exhaustive, and new tools are showing up all the time. Some tools take familiar paradigms and piv…

We wanted to see where Americans think Ukraine is and to learn if this knowledge (or lack thereof) is related to their foreign policy views

Neat visualisation - could be relevant for EEAS. "Political scientists Kyle Dropp, Joshua Kertzer, and Thomas Zeitzoff asked 2,066 Americans to find Ukraine on a map. Then they asked what the US should do in Ukraine. "We wanted to see where Americans think Ukraine is and to learn if this knowledge (or lack thereof) is related to their foreign pol…

... (if it ever was)". I wonder how long it will take the Brussels Bubble? "Have you watched somewhat helplessly these past few months as your Facebook interactions dropped rapidly? Has the "reach" of your posts dipped as low as you've ever seen it, no matter how great your content is? It's not your fault. It's Facebook's fault. And they're do…

" If we wanted more email subscribers, we’d have to make it easier for people to subscribe." Quartz's new approach to enewslettre subscription, which has seen daily subscriber rates double since February, is like the 'Quick Subscribe' feature I always propose for online community sites: - some users may create an account to subscribe, but most wo…

And not just journalists. New generation news sites are redefining news and, by consequence, rethinking information architecture, content strategy and CMS. I only hope the results filter through to everyone else, and sooner rather than later. "... a moment when young talent began demanding superior technology as the key to producing superior jour…

A new generation of companies, like CIRCA, are redefining the structure of how information is treated, and building new CMS to support it. Their approach will inevitably feed into a new generation of CMS for whom the 'article' and 'page' are, if not meaningless, at least optional. And I for one can't wait. "what we’re really doing at Circa is a…

"It’s hard to fake being useful. You have to know what you’re doing, from your strategy all the way through your execution. But when useful content is so important to your credibility, it’s hard to justify anything less. ... How do you make content useful? ... craft it with users’ real needs, decisions, and questions in mind" Insight 2 from resea…

"E-mail remains a significantly more effective way to acquire customers than social media—nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined " McKinsey continues with some basic rules for email communications, with brief case studies. Particularly like the impact of customising emails, something we did with the INFSO newsroom over 10 years ago…

Social media 101 perhaps, but worth sharing: "So what can you do to improve your SMO strategy and start generating some positive social signals that will produce powerful results for your business or brand? ...: - Reputation – building a strong reputation online that will have visitors viewing you as a trusted, reliable source. - Engagement …

Why does this brilliant video remind me of the preponderance of arts graduates in the #bxlsbbl?It’s really worth a look. And then another one. The acting here is actually superb. Watch the Expert’s expression run the gamut from shock to resignation in just a few minutes! (that one took me 20 years…)- via LaughingSquid: The Exper…